The type of user interfaces we are used from data mining and machine learning are slowly appearing for the R environment. Today I found Rattle – a Gnome-based interface to R (via KDnuggets). While tools like Weka or Orange are still a generation ahead of Rattle, Rattle itself is quite a bit better for certain types of tasks, such as model evaluation, compared to the usual command line interface. Here’s an example of ROC-based evaluation on various models on the same dataset:

One of the benefits of Rattle is that it also acts as a guide to various interesting R packages that I was not aware of earlier, and shows how they can be used: it generates a script created from the commands that were clicked graphically (something other systems could also do). The main downside of Rattle is that it only works with the latest version of R 2.4, but not with the earlier versions.